Staff Writer | July 31, 2018

Betterview, which is quickly becoming the platform essential to every transaction around buildings and properties, today announced the release of Property Profile. Property Profile was developed as a quick and cost-effective way to get a deep understanding of the characteristics and risks of a property and its roof. Property Profile leverages Betterview’s extensive experience inspecting properties and their roofs using machine learning and drone imagery.

Betterview’s Property Profile uses satellite & aerial imagery, along with a growing number of other data attributes like historical weather, to determine the condition and characteristics of a roof and the risk of future insurance claims. Betterview’s risk scoring is based on proprietary data and algorithms that Betterview has developed through its extensive property inspection experience and customer feedback.

Insurance companies are using Property Profile throughout the property insurance lifecycle, including:

Quoting: Speed up and improve the accuracy of policy application data for more accurate quotes that convert at a higher rate.

Underwriting & Loss-Control: Quickly assess new business and renewals to identify roof problems, as well as determine when and where to send inspectors to improve the customer and agent experience while reducing costs.

Betterview already has many customers that are realizing significant value from Property Profile, including Argo Insurance, who noted:

“Roof failures at a retail location are some of the most expensive we face as an insurer of supermarkets and restaurants,” said Rooney Gleason, President, Argo Insurance – US Grocery & Retail. “Beyond the obvious property losses, it can lead to food spoilage claims and significant business interruption claims. But what is often not discussed is that failing roofs often lead to costly third-party liability claims when customers have accidents as a result of poor premises maintenance. Betterview’s Property Profile helped us to uncover significant roof problems at multiple store locations that our customers were not aware of. This allowed them to address these issues with their landlord, or directly if they are the owner of the building, to reduce the likelihood of a roof related property and/or liability claim.”

Customers like Argo Insurance can access Betterview’s Property Profile roof scores and characteristics via API or through Betterview’s platform by typing in an address or uploading an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. Additional data points available with each Property Profile include property characteristics, historical weather, natural hazard risk, historical imagery, and more. Some of the characteristics that Betterview’s computer vision technology can automatically detect include:

● Roof Shape

● Roof Material

● Roof Damage

● Tree Overhang

● Ponding

● Rust

● And more

“Our goal is to make every building and property thoroughly understood,” said David Lyman, Co-Founder, Betterview. “With artificial intelligence, we can now analyze raw data sources like aerial and satellite imagery and derive new data and insights from them, allowing insurers to find the right coverages and pricing for their clients.”

Betterview developed Property Profile in response to feedback from customers who wanted information about buildings and properties faster and cheaper. While decreasing costs have improved ROI for drone inspections, insurers are still limiting their drone usage to high ROI use cases. As a result, Betterview figured out how to answer most of the questions its customers were asking using pre-captured aerial & satellite imagery, along with other data sources like historical weather.

“Over the last year, as demand for our drone inspections and reporting increased, many of our customers started asking us if we could help them to triage their drone inspections,” explained Dave Tobias, Co-Founder, Betterview. “When we created Property Profile, its original use case was to help our users to identify policies that should be inspected by a drone. After testing it with our customers, we started hearing about the value it could deliver throughout an organization. With this feedback we enhanced Property Profile by returning additional data sources, allowing for personal & commercial lines insurers to incorporate this information into their front-end and back-end workflows.”

In addition, to the release of its new Property Profile report, Betterview has

launched a new web site (www.betterview.net), which features an ROI calculator for Betterview services, new industry solutions page and more.

About Betterview

Betterview exists to make every building and property thoroughly understood. In an increasingly competitive environment, decision-makers are able to reduce risk, cost, and waste by leveraging the Betterview Machine Learning Platform to unlock actionable insight from an abundance of drone, aerial, and satellite imagery. For more information about Betterview, visit: https://www.betterview.net

ELECTRONIC CHAT

The Email Chat is a regular feature of the ITA Pro magazine and website. We send a series of questions to an insurance IT leader in search of thought-provoking responses on important issues facing the insurance industry.

Bill Sinn

ITA LIVE 2019

The tide is up! It's time to register for ITA LIVE 2019, our annual educational and networking conference! Our theme is "The InsurTech Revolution: Cutting Through the Hype." and we'll be bringing in a torrent of industry thought leaders, amazing insight and wonderful perspectives on the world of insurtech and
its impact on the insurance landscape.

ITA LIVE 2019 will present real-life examples of true startup technologies that are
helping insurers gain real advantage -- and a competitive edge --
in the marketplace. We’ll highlight the more successful InsurTech
partnerships, while offering case studies that demonstrate exciting
innovation and cutting-edge techniques impacting
all aspects of the insurance ecosystem.

Ride the wave to LIVE 2019. Sign up today!
We look forward to seeing you in May, 2019!